Sergey of Romanov-Zhukov

Sergey of Romanov-Zhukov (1885-1934) was a Russian nobleman of the House of Romanov and also an ancestor of the esteemed Russian general Georgy Zhukov. A general of the Russian Empire and later the White Army, he was captured by the Red Army in 1922 and later executed during the Great Purge of 1934.

Biography


Romanov-Zhukov was born in the city of Krakow in the Province of Poland, in the Russian Empire. A nephew of Czar Alexander II (who died in a car bombing four years before his birth), Romanov-Zhukov was originally called Sergey Romanov. He was educated in Warsaw, the capital of Poland, and married noblewoman Tatiyana Zhukov, and he changed his last name to Romanov-Zhukov to honor both families.

In 1905, at the age of 20, he was made a Major in the Russian Army with no previous military experience and fought in the Russo-Japanese War in Manchuria. The inexperienced Prince follied many times, resulting in many Russian deaths in failed offensives and attacks. But because he was the cousin of Nicholas II of Russia, he remained in command and was awarded the Order of St. George, 3rd Class in 1906. An unpopular man, Romanov-Zhukov was not respected by his peers and was held in high regard by some only because he was a nobleman.

When World War I broke out in 1914 Czar Nicholas was quick to establish his cousin as a general, commanding the Russian 21st Army in the European theater. His forces were mauled during the combat with the German Army or Austro-Hungarian Army and in 1916 he was relieved of command by Grigori Rasputin, regent of Russia, because he seemed to have a lack of respect for him. Romanov-Zhukov conspired with others to kill Rasputin, a job at which they succeeded, and Romanov-Zhukov was restored to command. However, he was unassigned before the February 1917 revolution that overthrew the Czar and his ministers, and he rode to Kiev to join the White Army to oppose the revolutionary Red Army.

During the Russian Civil War, Romanov-Zhukov was sidelined because of his unpopularity, and was instead used as an advertising tool to recruit tsarist officers into the White forces. In 1922, fleeing around the country as the White Army was destroyed, he was captured by NKVD around Ufa, Bashkiria, where he had taken a lodging. During the aftermath of the Russian Civil War he was imprisoned in the Siberian gulags along with other political prisoners, and he was released in 1930 after promising to not resist the current Soviet Union government. But during Josef Stalin's Great Purge of 1934-1939 he was one of the first to be targeted, because he was a nobleman.

He was sentenced to death, and was shot in the back of the head in an NKVD execution chamber in Kazan.